![]() They also know that no matter what they do, any casualty or apparent ill treatment of service personnel or their families will be front page news. If not the MoD and media then we must be able to rely on politicians to inject some hard nosed reality.Īlthough we have all had harsh words for them, I am generally more sympathetic to Secretaries of State for Defence than one might imagine, the MoD is a tough gig because it’s poor reputation and, as above, complete lack of credibility make every decision a difficult one. What role do they play except being a mouthpiece for the leak of the day, carefully released from one faction or another within the MoD, services and industry? Without anyone holding the MoD decision makers to account nothing will change. Instead of actually seeing through the issues they peddle their tittle tattle and woefully inadequate analysis, cats and flaps indeed.Įven the august body that is RUSI can’t get the basics right, as their latest piece on CVF shows. In a world dominated by the 24×7 news cycle, the lack of meaningful analysis in the mainstream media, because we all seemingly have the attention span of a Goldfish, is a real tragedy. It is easy to talk of seat polishing bureaucrats or heartless penny pinching politicians because it fits the lazy brained journalistic narrative but it is far from the truth. Journalists default to the position that everything in uniform equals good and politician or civil servant equals bad. Unfortunately not, they are also sleeping on the job. I must not be alone in thinking this, the massed ranks of the mainstream media are surely on the case? ![]() When the National Security Strategy was published post the last election it talked about terrorism, regional instability and cyber-attacks but it singularly failed to recognise the obvious, that the squabbling children that are the defence decision makers in this country are working hard every day to undermine our defence posture and represent the highest risk! The clearest threat to the UK’s strategic interests is this combination, transnational terrorists and rogue dictators are mere amateurs when compared with inter service politics and execution incompetence. Like some witch, crouching over a bubbling cauldron the final recipe in the potion is not eye of newt but a good stiff measure of inter service politics. This obsession with prestige major equipment projects, combined with the MoD’s general lack of credibility on all things financial combine to form a toxic brew. I have even heard people genuinely talk about whose turn it is now, the Royal Air Force have had their turn with the Typhoon so the Fleet Air Arm should have a gazillion F35C’s. Instead of putting equipment into the rightful context of a national strategy we put equipment at the top of the agenda and write our strategy around it, tail wagging dog. One of my other major bugbears is that our national defence and security strategy has become equipment centric, the armed forces are not seen in the context of how they contribute to national defence, promotion of our interests or values, but by how many FRES Scouts ‘feel right’ or whether the extra range of the F35C makes us second only to the US Navy. If any project, and there are many others, absolutely typifies the MoD’s complete and utter lack of credibility, it is the CVF/JCA omnishambles. What chance do they have with aircraft, ships and vehicles when at every turn, there is a banana skin?Ĭan we blame the media for taking the easy line, Treasury officials for being openly scornful of MoD project accounting, the National Audit Office for copying and pasting the forward to their Major Project Reports from the last one and everyone else to just shrugging their shoulders when the latest hugely expensive cock up is revealed? Incompetence and your common or garden fuckwittery are closely associated with the senior staff, the decision makers, at the MoD, in fact, the MoD is so closely associated with incompetence that no one is actually surprised when it can’t even get buying ladders right. It has been obvious to me for some time that the commodity the MoD lacks the most is credibility.Ĭredibility with politicians, credibility with the Treasury, credibility with the media and last but by no means least, credibility with service personnel Never in the field of human conflict has so much embarrassment been caused to so many by so few. I have been writing about Project CVF since I started running my ill-educated mouth off on the pages of Think Defence (bloody hell, is it really 4 years ago) and I can’t remember a time when the Daily Mail esque words of national disgrace have been apt, but if the recent article in the Telegraph about CVF is true then quite simply, those words apply.
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